This past week, I worked on optimizing the visualizer by trying to computing the arrow vectors across the multiple processes. However, we ran into many issues with variable sharing across parallel processes in python. We ended up using python’s multiprocess shared memory manager for the different processes, but we found that the bottleneck was actually rendering the image after computing the poses for the robots and the paths. We solved this by downsampling the visualization image and scaling all our arrows by the same ratio to match. I also worked on minor bug fixes on our software stack, like modifying our infinite control loop to exit if all the pallets have been dropped off. I also implemented a timeout in the robot firmware where if it hasn’t received a servo command for over a second, it detaches the servos so that the robot stops.
The rescope from our original proposal is just limiting the number of robots we have on the field to 3 robots.